Suburban slang greets visitors to France

By JOHN LICHFIELD

PARIS - In Britain, suburban chatter is about lawn-mowers and train cancellations and school fees. In France the "tchatche" (chatter) of the banlieues (suburbs) is about drugs, police, unemployment, guns, how to travel free on the buses and women. Especially about women.

In a new, expanded edition of the dictionary of "verlan" - the rich, hybrid language of alienated, racially diverse, French, suburban youth - there are more than 50 ways of referring to women.

They include "belette, bitch, caille, charnelle, clira, dama, djig, faoua, fatma, fax, febosse, feumeu, fillasse, frangine, gadji, galle, garce, gavali, gazelle, gaziere, go, gorette, meuda, meuf, muroroa, og, payotte, racli, raclette, scarlette, sister etc etc." Some of these terms are insulting; others admiring. A "muroroa" for example is a desirable woman (probably one with large "air-bags" or "rovers" or "ananas"). A "carte-bleue" (credit card) or a "fax" is a skinny woman.

The dictionary - "Comment tu Tchatches!", published in its new edition this month - reflects the often brutal sexism of young men in the French banlieues, where it is rare to see young women alone out of doors. It also reflects the bewildering, racial and cultural diversity of the poor suburbs of French cities, which are the social equivalent to "inner cities" in Britain or the United States.

In France, with the exception of Marseilles and decreasing areas of Paris, the "inner cities" have been taken over by the trendy or non-trendy white bourgoisie - or, in suburban slang, the "geoisbours" or "gaulois" or "fesses d'oignon" (onion-arses).

The poor, French suburbs, unlike the "ghettos" of the US or Britain, are not racially segregated. A youth gang ("deban" or "posse") might include kids ("keums") of French ("blondin") and Arab ("reube") origin, alongside blacks ("blacks" or "blanches-neiges"), Pakistanis ("kitspas"), Gipsies ("tanjs") and east Europeans, who are not yet in the dictionary but are often known generically as "Russes".

Hence the linguistic pot-pourri of banlieue slang, which has, according to Jean-Pierre Goudailler, the compiler of the dictionary, virtually become a separate language, roughly based on French grammar.

The list of synonyms for women quoted above includes words taken from English (sister, scarlette), African languages (go), Arabic (fatma), Romany (gadji) and old French slang (frangine). It also includes examples of the bizarre, backwards-slang of "verlan" proper. The syllables of French or foreign words are reversed, so that monnaie becomes "naiemo" and femme "meuf".

Mr Goudailler, a Professor of linguistics at the Sorbonne, says that suburban slang, started off as a kind of game, like older forms of working class or trade slang. It has become a defiant badge of identity, a way of forging the unity of the racially splintered suburbs in the face of the rejection and fear of "mainstream" France.

His dictionary was first published in 1997 but has now been much expanded and revised, using words from rap music, books and movies as well as his personal researches.

Some suburban slang words are beginning to enter the language of the well-heeled, city-living young, through movies and rap music. "Meuf", the back-to-front form of "femme" has now virtually replaced older slang forms such as "nana", as the Gallic equivalent of "chick" or "bird".

But "verlan" proper remains, deliberately, incomprehensible to outsiders.

The French sentence "C'est un gars, qui connaît que des problèmes" (He's a guy with heaps of problems) becomes "C'te keum l'a qu' des blèmes."

"Il y a des contrôleurs partout dans le Métro" (There are inspectors all over the Metro) becomes "C'est plein de leurleurs toutpar dans le trom."

The standard French political or acadmic reaction to "verlan" is to complain that it is undermining the French language/dividing France/making education in the suburbs even more difficult than it already is.

The impenetrable, new, suburban language also reflects an ironic truth about the youth of the banlieues (who, if you meet them, are not so uniformly violent and hopeless as they are sometimes painted in the French and foreign press). They are extraordinarily cosmopolitan and, at the same time, depressingly parochial, obsessed with the conflicts and status symbols of a world, bounded by the Boulevard Périphérique and the next group of tower blocks.

Mr Goudailler, who has spent many weeks in the banlieues all over France gathering words and phrases, takes a more optimistic view.

"Many of these kids don't know how to speak the language of their parents.

They can usually speak a more standard form of French, when they choose to," he said. "But they are proud to speak verlan, a deliberately de-natured, chopped about form of French, with contributions from all their different ethnic backgrounds. It is their way of federating all the tribes of the banlieue into one nation."

Mr Goudailler suggests that his dictionary should be used in suburban schools - not to replace French but to help to lead the youth of the banlieue back to the "language of Racine and Molière".

"Often, the kids themselves don't know the origin and diversity of the words they speak. If they can be persuaded to take an interest in the nature of language, through studying and analysing the language they know best, it may be possible to encourage them to take more interest in standard French."

"Comment tu Tchatches!" by Jean-Pierre Goudailler is published by Maisonneuve et Larose.

"Tchatcher" - to chat or spiel - sounds as if it comes from English but actually comes from Spanish by way of Algerian slang.

- INDEPENDENT